Florence Pugh plays a chef with cancer, while Andrew Garfield is her ideal partner in a tragic romance with real chemistry and the most contrived timeline imaginable.

One moment, award-winning chef Almut (Florence Pugh) wakes her lover Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and asks him to taste her latest concoction. The next, it’s the middle of the night and the now-pregnant Almut is sitting on the toilet, timing her contractions.

Effective love stories are made up of moments big and small. In “We Live in Time,” John Crowley has created a greatest-hits version of a typical romantic comedy, serving up all the important scenes from Almut and Tobias’ relationship — meeting each other’s families, the marriage proposal, parenthood, divorce, cancer diagnoses, etc. — but not in that order.

It’s a clumsy way to tell a story, but Crowley is convinced that Pugh and Garfield’s chemistry will be so compelling that people will want to watch his film again and again, at which point Almut and Tobias’s memories will have become our memories, and the order will hardly matter. That’s one interpretation, at least, of a film conceived by acclaimed playwright Nick Payne, which seems far less ambitious and less conceptual than his slim but brilliant one-act “Constellations,” a multiverse romance written in 2012, before multiverses were all the rage.